Katie Kitamura - A Separation

Of course it had been in the air—as the endgame, the worst-case scenario, an inevitability or relief. The word was weighted, ça me pèse , a condition of adulthood. In childhood, words are weightless—I shout I hate you and it means nothing, the same can be said for I love you— but as an adult, those very words are used with greater care, they no longer slip out of the mouth with the same ease. I do is another example, a phrase that in childhood is only the stuff of playacting, a game between children, but then grows freighted with meaning.

How many times had I myself spoken these words? Only once since becoming an adult. Christopher and I were married in a courtroom and arrived only minutes before the brief ceremony, there was no rehearsal, the judge assured us that we need only repeat after him, even an idiot couldn’t get it wrong. And so when I said I do before the assembled group of our family and friends, it was for the first time, or at least the first time since childhood.

I remembered being surprised by the power of the ritual, the ceremonial act of speaking these words, which took on a deep and almost maniac significance. It suddenly made sense that these words— I do— would be paired with the archaic and unreasonable phrase until death do us part , which was morbid and apparently out of place in what was meant to be a joyful occasion, but which nonetheless served a clear purpose: to remind the participants of the crazed wager they were making in this act, this act being marriage.

I tried to remember what else I had felt during the ceremony, not so many years ago but long enough for my memory to be uncertain. I thought there had been a brief moment of terror but mostly I had been happy, I had been very happy, for a long time it was a good and optimistic marriage. For all these reasons, it was difficult to contemplate the pronouncement of the word that would destroy all that optimism, however outdated—and so although I remained at the hotel in order to ask Christopher for a divorce, I found that I was in no hurry to confront him, I had made a decision that I believed to be absolute, and yet I could have sat in the sun for days, for weeks, without moving, without doing anything, without speaking a word.

Later that afternoon, a couple arrived who could only have been the pair that was to occupy Christopher’s room. They stumbled through the lobby already drunk, they must have begun in the car, the same driver who had delivered me to the hotel followed them into the lobby dragging three large cases behind him. Briefly, his eyes met mine, but apart from a small nod he did not acknowledge me, he had his hands full with the couple.

They looked Scandinavian, both pale and blue-eyed and essentially incongruous in this landscape, for which they had not been designed. The woman’s hair was bleached blond and the man was somehow already sunburnt, his skin a hectic and uncomfortable red. They were evidently very fond of each other. They kissed constantly, even from across the lobby I could see how they were flexing their tongues in an impressively muscular fashion, they could not give Kostas—he was on duty behind the desk, his face stoic—more than a single piece of information—their name, their country of origin, their date of departure—before they were at it again.

Kostas stared at the wall behind the embracing couple as he told them that breakfast was served on the terrace, asked which newspaper they wanted in the morning, whether they would be needing a wake-up call, although it was obvious they would not. The pair seemed undeterred by the utter quiet of the hotel. When they spoke they were overloud and giddy, they allowed their voices to carry, it was as if they believed themselves to be checking into a hotel in Las Vegas or Monaco.

I watched as they followed Kostas across the lobby, arms wrapped around each other, it was remarkable how constantly they telegraphed their desire for each other, it simply did not let up. They disappeared up the stairs and in the direction of Christopher’s room, although of course it was no longer Christopher’s room, the porter following with their bags. Earlier that afternoon I had seen the same porter carrying Christopher’s cases, one in each hand, down rather than up the stone staircase, to the lobby storage room.

Of Christopher himself there had been no sign. I sat on the terrace for the remainder of the afternoon with a novel I was considering translating, about a couple whose child goes missing in the desert. The novel had been sent to me by a publisher, I would need to translate a sample chapter at least, we would need to see if it was a good fit. The task of a translator is a strange one. People are prone to saying that a successful translation doesn’t feel like a translation at all, as if the translator’s ultimate task is to be invisible.

Perhaps that is true. Translation is not unlike an act of channeling, you write and you do not write the words. Christopher always found the way I spoke about my work too vague, it did not impress him, perhaps because he thought it was imprecise and even mystical, or perhaps because he intuited what I was really saying, which was that translation’s potential for passivity appealed to me. I could have been a translator or a medium, either would have been the perfect occupation for me. Such a statement would of course have horrified him, and been crafted to do so. Christopher had wanted to be a writer—not just a writer, but an author—since he was a child.

I continued reading for several hours. Once or twice I saw Kostas, he brought me a coffee, asked if I planned to dine in the hotel that evening. He made no mention of Christopher, and the one time I asked if he had returned, Kostas shook his head and shrugged. No sign of him, nothing at all. In the evening, the young woman who had been on duty that morning returned, giving me a sour look as she passed through the lobby.

I watched her as she went on her way, although the hotel was quiet she apparently had a great many things to do, she was constantly rushing from one side of the lobby to the other, answering the phone, barking orders to the porters and maids. She was not unattractive, I tried to imagine Christopher and this woman together—he would have flirted with her at the very least, perhaps he had even gone to bed with her, such a thing was not impossible, or even unlikely.

As I continued observing her, I could see that although she was not pretty—her features were too heavy to be described in such conventional terms, they were very expressive, which was generally not considered appealing in a woman’s face (hence the mania for treatments like Botox, for face creams that promised to freeze the features into youthful immobility; it was more than the mere pursuit of youth, it arose out of a universal aversion to a woman’s propensity to be excessive, to be too much )—she was alluring, undoubtedly so.

She had the kind of body that intrigued men. They looked at it and wondered what it would be like to touch, how its contours would feel beneath their hands, what was its weight and heft. I noted that, with her heavy brow and long black hair—plaited in a simple braid that hung halfway down her back—she was my physical opposite. It was more than a question of coloring, she had a supremely practical body, one whose purpose was clear. The purposes of my own body were sometimes too opaque, there had been many moments when its discrete parts—legs, arms, torso—made no sense even to me, as they lay there on the bed.

But this woman’s body made sense. I watched her through the glass as she moved back and forth across the lobby, she was wearing a hotel uniform and was shod in sensible shoes, it was the kind of job that kept you on your feet all day long. Although she walked quickly, it was as if her body were leaden, she was a woman firmly tethered to the ground. Perhaps such carnality was in the end irresistible. Christopher would have perceived her allure at once, he was a sophisticated man, whose marriage was suspended, also a man with no scruples and a tourist in this place, everything around him would have appeared essentially disposable.